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October 30, 2015

Meanwhile, in the Big Apple

A woman using a power wheelchair had a minor crash when getting off a bus in New York. An ambulance was called and the EMTs wanted to take her to the hpospital.
What to do with the 250 pound wheelchair? No one knew. She went home instead, but took the time to write the mayor, who referred it to something called Collaborative Policing.

As the Times reports (Ms. Herman is involved in interdepartmental affairs):

“A few days later, the mayor’s office writes to us in collaborative policing, saying, more or less, ‘This is a problem, fix this,’ ” Ms. Herman said.

Thus convened what is far too often the greatest sinkhole of government: the interagency conference. Typically — well, maybe not typically, but frequently — people from multiple agencies at such gatherings will do two things. They will admire a problem. Then they will creatively avoid dealing with it.

Ms. Herman did not detail any bureaucratic gore. “After a bunch of conversations, it appeared the best way to resolve this was that we would buy ramps that can hitch onto the back of E.S.U. trucks,” she said, referring to the Police Department’s Emergency Service Unit, which can do almost anything — hostage negotiations, rescuing children whose hands are trapped in a fence, riding Jet Skis to water emergencies and mounting SWAT teams.

The solution was a trailer with a ramp that can hold the wheelchair. Ten trucks are now equipped with them, at a cost of $200 each. The wheelchair can be moved to the next place that the person lands.

“You can just ride or guide the wheelchair up a ramp and it sits onto a cantilevered platform, out of the back of the truck,” Ms. Herman said. “For $2,000, this shouldn’t happen to anyone else.”

Can it happen in Halifax? Can our city councilors pry themselves away from important culinary deliberations long enough to behave like adults? Can Mr. Butts descend from the mountain long enough to deliver a $2000 cheque? Can a SWAT team handle a wheelchair?

One in One Thousand - The forgotten legacy of James McGregor Stewart

James McGregor Stewart, 1889-1955, son of a Pictou lawyer, grandson of a Cape Breton minister, was a principal of Stewart, McKelvey, the downtown Halifax law firm. In his time he was Nova Scotia’s premier corporate lawyer, and he wrote the rules for many of our most successful and long-lived companies. He was president of the Canadian Bar between the wars. He is one of fewer than 500 Canadians to be awarded the Commander of the British Empire for services to the Empire in WW II. His obituary was in the New York Times.
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